Category Archives: Security

Robin Wright has an interesting story in the Washington Post about the shrinking perimeter that journalists have experienced when travelling in Iraq with the US Secretary of State over the past two years. From a two night stay in a hotel in downtown Baghdad and idle strolls down the streets in mid-2003 to an extremely brief look at the desolate barricades and then a same-day extraction complete with “blackout” to avoid enemy fire; the article makes it sound as though security has deteriorated by nature of the fact that mobility is restricted, information leaks are a major concern and the exchange of goods in public is now impossible.

Have you ever wanted a phone that has a pedometer? How about a music player that you can shake to skip to the next song (yes, as a feature — perhaps it came as a side-effect to the non-skip technology rush of the 90s). Leave it to Samsung to bundle these exciting capabilities into a cell phone and then announce “gesture recognition with health management and leisure features”. MobileKorea.TV has more information:

The handset is also loaded with â€œBobsleighâ€?, â€œShootingâ€?, and other games, which are activated by the user gesture.

Loaded with Shooting? I can think of a few gestures that might be really bad for one’s health. But I digress…

Next up, phones that recognize you by your gait and can automatically dial numbers based on the steps you take. Two steps to the left, three forward, one step back, you shake it all about and…that’s how you dial “Voicemail”

One morning in late September 2005, Deb was riding the public bus to work. She was minding her own business, reading a book and planning for work, when a security guard got on this public bus and demanded that every passenger show their ID. Deb, having done nothing wrong, declined. The guard called in federal cops, and she was arrested and charged with federal criminal misdemeanors after refusing to show ID on demand.

On the 9th of December 2005, Deborah Davis will be arraigned in U.S. District Court in a case that will determine whether Deb and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show “papers” whenever a cop demands them.

What would a policeman do with her ID? Was he collecting them, writing them down, or adding them to his database? Was he looking for a specific profile or just “taking names”? What if you did not have an ID? Would he have been able to detect a fake ID if it was from another state or even country? What was the threat? A spy? An imposter? A bomber? The description of the actual event sounds more like bandits in the Wild West staging a hold-up than any kind of federal security mandate:

The second cop said everyone had to show ID any time they were asked by the police, adding that if she were in a Wal-Mart and was asked by the police for ID, that she would have to show it there, too. She explained that she didn’t have to show him or any other policeman my ID on a public bus or in a Wal-Mart. She told him she was simply trying to go to work. Suddenly, the second policeman shouted “Grab her!” and he grabbed the cell phone from her and threw it to the back of the bus. With each of the policemen wrenching one of her arms behind her back, she was jerked out of her seat, the contents of her purse and book bag flying everywhere. The cops shoved her out of the bus, handcuffed her, threw her into the back seat of a police cruiser, and drove her to a police station inside the confines of the Denver Federal Center.

And one of the other passengers was heard yelling “she’s a witch, just look at her nose!” But seriously, what on earth possessed these policemen to do something so rediculously self-defeating? At the very best they created fear among bus passengers, perhaps leading them to sound an alert about the current federal government’s search for an identity, false or otherwise.

Bruce Perens noted in his blog on November 18th that Richard Stallman was causing quite a stir at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis because he wrapped his RFID badge in aluminum foil. I suppose that is about as good a publicity stunt as you could hope for if you are someone opposed to radio-based identification and tracking. Security would have been wise to have just left him alone, rather than making a fuss and trying to detain him between sessions.

You can’t give Richard a visible RF ID strip without expecting him to protest. Richard acquired an entire roll of aluminum foil and wore his foil-shielded pass prominently. He willingly unwrapped it to go through any of the visible check-points, he simply objected to the potential that people might be reading the RF ID without his knowledge and tracking him around the grounds. This, again, is a legitimate gripe, handled with Richard’s usual highly-visible, guile-less and absolutely un-subtle style of non-violent protest.

I was riding in an airplane not very long ago, seated next to a young woman who was on her way to visit a college. She was from somewhere in Oregon where everyone goes to a Christian school and practices strict rules of virtuous living. For example, she said, children are not allowed to carry bags or boxes in the school buildings in order to ensure that everyone can safely escape during a fire.

Makes sense, right? I didn’t think so either. But I wasn’t content to just nod blithely and let her discover reality on her own. No, I had to argue with her for several hours and try to help her arrive at a more logical conclusion about rules that ban kids from carrying bags.

One item in particular that really seemed to surprise her was that Darwin might have contributed something meaningful to the modern world. Believe it or not, this intelligent-seeming woman had been told that Darwin wrote a Theory of Evolution because his daughter died at a young age and so he became an athiest and just wanted to thumb his nose at God. I’m not making this up. She said they learned this in school, as well as bible camp. It’s amazing what passes for an education in America these days. Anyway, the story only became stranger when the woman said she was planning to study biology or chemistry in college. “How it doesn’t really exist?” I asked with glee.

To make a long story short, I don’t know if I made a positive impact on this woman, but I did my best to help her emphasize critical thinking and using the scientific method to arrive at conclusions in order to gradually help her debunk most of what she had probably been raised to believe as absolute gospel. And then today I read the amusing news that a NY museum has said that without Darwin’s theory we would be far less able to research and fight the bird flu:

“Without his insights, we would fail to appreciate the dangerous potentials of rapid evolution in the avian flu virus,” Michael Novacek, curator of paleontology at the museum, told a news conference on Tuesday.

To which the creationists replied “Obviously God created Darwin so that he could create the insights that would create the understanding that will create the ultimate vaccine for those who are chosen to survive. Isn’t that self evident? You say ‘proof’, I say banana.”

I’m a big fan of digital camera technology, and thus I usually am quick to support intelligent uses related to detective controls. Take for example a Bed & Breakfast that had issues with people loitering across the street dealing drugs. The B&B installed a camera, took some extracted video to the absent property owner and the next thing you know the neighborhood felt safe again. Here’s another example. Some well-intentioned system administrators were moving equipment in the racks when suddenly a core network device went off-line. Everyone started pointing fingers but a simple review of the video at the exact moment that the services were terminated shows who was in the cookie jar pulling power cables, and who was not.

Surveillance doesn’t happen in a vacuum, however, and there should be the same care and caution applied as with any other detective controls. Sadly, some investigators get so excited about the opportunity to nail every tiny infraction with uncontestably strong evidence that they start to sound like rabid dogs, ready to chase down every living thing and chew it to the bone.

BRITAINâ€™S top traffic policeman is pushing through plans to create a national network of roadside spy cameras that will be able to track the movements of motorists around the clock.

Meredydd Hughes wants the cameras to be installed every 400 yards on motorways, as well as at supermarkets, petrol stations and in town centres.

They are designed to crack down on uninsured driving, road tax evasion and stolen cars, but will also monitor millions of law-abiding drivers.

It sounds expensive and invasive with little return, if you ask me. One thing that surveillance camera projects should never do is start with an overly broad objective. It is similar to saying you want to write software to improve security every 400 yards on motorways…if you don’t start out with a good focus on the purpose of the system, then you will never end up with a clear picture of its usefulness.

On the other hand, when someone actually reveals that not only is there no intended benefit to the public but the real purpose of the surveillance (detective control) system is to become a source of revenue/taxation for the police, well, that should ring some alarm bells under the category of “clear conflict of interest”:

An Acpo strategy document, seen by The Sunday Times, makes the controversial suggestion that every ANPR â€œintercept officerâ€? should aim to issue at least 310 fixed-penalty notices a year.

Fascinating article in the Guardian by Jeff Jarvis about online communication as a tool in the French riots:

the arrest last week of at least three young bloggers for allegedly using their sites to incite violence precisely highlights the confusion this new medium brings

I am surprised to hear that the French government is trying to control the debate by spending advertising money on Google. That just seems unsettling on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to begin.

The Guardian reports today that train stations in the UK are considering passenger security to be implemented in a similar fashion to airports. The problem with train stations today, which they rightly identify, is that they are not “closed”, especially compared to the sealed-off nature of airport terminals. Trains also are regularly accessible, unlike planes at 30,000 ft.

When you get right down to it, train security actually does not have much in common with planes other than the movement of large numbers of passengers on a schedule (e.g. “public transportation”).

The airport screening model seems to be increasingly considered high-cost and largely biased in some odd control areas, especially if you consider the lack of relevance to other forms of public transportation, so let’s hope the upcoming conference gets back to the basics like preventive and detective controls, defense-in-depth, etc.

An increase in attacks meant to setup high speed, public, distribution networks (pubstro) seems to be spreading. In a nutshell, this means vulnerable servers are being used as hosts for hidden ftp servers with little impact on other data that might be exposed on the host. Nothing especially new here other than the amazing efficiency of the attacks, which leads to robust “networks” of compromised systems, as well as the fact that breach laws are now in effect. The odd situation with market forces in this scenario is that attackers seem better at writing code to remotely install agents to generate revenue than many of the companies that are actually supposed to be in charge of the servers themselves. If this rate of change goes unchecked, my guess is that developers may see a more lucrative future in stealing resources than in being tasked to try and prevent them from being stolen. But who should bear the cost of the disincentives?

Some discussion on Educause suggests even fully-patched Windows 2000 systems are at risk.

Jason Garms finally stepped up to the plate on Saturday, November 12th, 2005 and announced that Microsoft’s internal Anti-Malware Engineering Team formally acknowledges Mark Russinovich’s October 31st, 2005 blog entry and will now add Sony’s DRM software into its anti-malware software. That’s right, twelve days after the news broke and two full days after exploits were documented in the wild, Microsoft has quietly announced on a blog that they are going to update their signatures.

Here is Microsoft’s criteria for determining what is spyware, and here are some comments I made earlier.

Quite frankly, we all know that people dumped Microsoft’s anti-spyware software once it was revealed that they cave to companies for odd reasons (which begs the question of what spyware company wouldn’t apply pressure if they know they can — hello, spyware is all about being annoying and persistent, no?).

But even so, I am really disappointed that Microsoft continues to show that they are not the kind of company that a user or company can bank on if they need security. Sony has had to eat so much publicity about this issue that just about everyone and their dog is aware of the issue (contrary to what Thomas Hesse, President of Sony BMG, suggested in an NPR interview, that people don’t know enough to care about root-kits). Just take a look at an anti-virus company who started addressing the issue the very day the news of the root-kit broke. F-secure claims that they were even working on it prior to Mark’s announcement because they were fielding reports about the same suspicious behavior.

The Inquirer responded to Microsoft’s blog announcement on Sunday, November 13th, 2005, with an excellent write-up on why this giant company, yet again, seems to entirely miss the point on what it means to establish trust with users. In brief, one might summarize their point as something similar to the old adage “it’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up”:

So, what do we end the day with? Microsoft dipping a toe in the water and saying it will remove a solitary DRM infection. No future pledges, no strong stand. I was honestly hoping MS would stand up and plant a stake in the ground about things like this. A week later with a murmur in a blog is not the response of a market leader.

Mark has an excellent summary himself today, called “Sony: No More Rootkit – For Now”, regarding the Microsoft announcement as well as the Sony soundbite from NPR. Most importantly, he clarifies that the viruses are just a symptom of bad security:

The viruses simply take advantage of the Sony rootkit if itâ€™s present, but could just as easily install their own rootkit to hide their presence on the system. If a user activating the virus, which is transmitted as an email attachment, is running with administrator privileges, the virus can install a kernel-mode rootkit just as powerful as Sonyâ€™s. But even if the virus is activated from a non-administrator account it can install a less powerful, though still effective, user-mode rootkit. The bottom line is that itâ€™s not rootkits themselves that are the problem; itâ€™s the inability to manage the objects that they hide that creates security, reliability and manageability problems.

His point that Sony owns the IP not the computer just reminds me of the story about people who “own” their cars and want the error codes under the Right to Repair Act. Transparency of technology and the ability to protect oneself from predatory corporations are gearing up to be tough issues for the next few years.